Evan Spiegel Quotes

Most of us still haven't grasped the fact that everything we commit to the digital space - not just our public blogs and broadcast tweets, but every private text message, email, and voicemail is likely to be stored and accessible. Forever.

The idea that you can somehow erase the Internet is silly.

TheIinternet is a timeless void - you put something in there, and it's there forever and loses a lot of context.

Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.

If you put something online, it's essentially there forever. You don't know who's kept it, who's screenshotted it.

When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.

Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives.

For the longest time, the way that I had understood 4chan was this idea that the lack of an archive made the content really ephemeral, and it took me a while, but I finally realized that that's just totally wrong.

Of course, authors can still burn their manuscripts - but once something is out in the world, especially if it ever saw the digital light of day, it's harder and harder to call it back.

As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.

Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians.

Just remember when you post something, the computers remember forever.

Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

It's so cheap to store all data. It's cheaper to keep it than to delete it. And that means people will change their behavior because they know anything they say online can be used against them in the future.

So we should preserve it. I don't think that digital storage is necessarily a good thing, but I definitely think that digital manipulation is interesting.

My parents were early adopters, and I've been online since a rather young age. You should regard anything from 2001 or earlier as having been written by a different person who also happens to be named 'Eliezer Yudkowsky.' I do not share his opinions.

You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

It would be better for everyone if we deleted everything by default and saved the things that are important to us.

I'm a person who always wanted to turn my life into an archive. Social media made my dream come true.

As I like to say, the entire collective memory of the species - that means all known and recorded information - is going to be just a few keystrokes away in a matter of years.

Now, not every blog post or 'Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet' piece deserves to live forever. But there's gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes.

If we don't record our own history on the Net, it will disappear.